Can you imagine your life without a mobile phone and internet connection? It’s getting harder to picture these days. The age of the internet changed everything; our culture, our relationships, how we consume media, how we shop, how we communicate, and how we do business. Everything is now so fast-paced.
With modern communication tools, you can easily chat with friends no matter where they are; or sit in a meeting with twelve other people, from twelve different countries around the world.
We opened the floodgate of communication and created several communication channels like phone calls, SMS, email, social media, and messaging apps, to keep us in touch. And as everyday people use these communication channels for their one-on-one interactions, businesses also harness them to communicate with their customers.
But with pretty much every invention, comes its problems. In the past, whenever people wanted to interact with a business, they could only go to the physical store or office and talk to someone. Then telephones were invented and people could choose between calling and going to the physical store. Two options, simple right? Well, today they have up to ten options, and they want to use them all, sometimes simultaneously.
What happens when several people are calling, texting, emailing, and chatting with you, all at the same time, through different channels, to enquire about what you sell?
How do you handle a customer that starts a conversation on a call, leaves it, and returns later to continue the same conversation on a WhatsApp chat?
What happens when your customers are frustrated because they expect your customer service or sales reps to know what they want and/or had discussed with another sales representative?
The solution to this is called Omnichannel Customer Service. In this article, you’ll learn about Omnichannel Customer Service and how businesses can harness it to grow and satisfy their customers.
Omnichannel customer service connects several communication channels such as social media pages, calls, SMS, emails, etc., and brings it all into one platform. It is sometimes called Omnichannel Service Desk, Omnichannel Customer Support, or Omnichannel Customer Experience.
The goal is to give your customers a consistent and unified experience across these different communication channels. In other words, irrespective of the communication channel a customer chooses to contact a business with, they can be sure to have the same smooth experience.
Omnichannel customer service goes beyond providing options for customers and agents to interact or communicate. It also automatically syncs all customer information, messages, notes, files, and other data, across all channels. This makes it easy for the customers and the customer support reps to seamlessly switch from one channel, device, and touchpoint to another during conversations.
What percentage of your customers does your business currently retain? If that figure is not up to 89%, perhaps it is time to consider omnichannel customer service.
Retain up to 89% of your customers with NotchCX Omnichannel Customer Service
It is easy to confuse omnichannel with multichannel. While it can be argued that one leads to the other, the two are not the same.
Most businesses would argue that they provide omnichannel customer service. Their reason would be that their customers can reach them through various communication channels. Well, that’s multichannel, not omnichannel.
See How CRM Can increase Sales by up to 300%
Multichannel customer service means being present everywhere your customers are. It’s about giving different communication options to prospects and customers, but not necessarily linking them into a seamless system.
Customers can talk to the company via phone calls, web chat, Whatsapp, or email, but the conversations can not be moved from there to another platform. If that happens, the potential customer will need to explain everything they said in the previous conversation.
On the other hand, omnichannel customer experience takes multichannel further by linking these channels to provide a consistent, interconnected, and personalized customer service.
It is Alexa’s first wedding anniversary, and she wants to get her husband a nice pair of shoes to celebrate. She finds an online store that has a nice collection of fabulous shoes, but they come in different shapes, designs, and materials. She needed a sales or customer service rep to help her make the right decision.
Alexa finds the online store’s web chat and drops a message. It took a while and she almost left, but someone named Joe finally responded. Joe is helpful and guides Alexa to make her decision. She is just about to make the purchase when something comes up at the office, and she needs to go. She later returns but the web chat channel is no longer available.
Luckily, she finds the store’s Whatsapp number and sends a chat. A different sales rep attends to her but needs Alexa to repeat the same conversation she already had with Joe. She is frustrated and leaves the store for another one.
With Omnichannel Customer Service, the sales or customer service rep would seamlessly have all the data to continue the conversation.
Using a CRM that supports omnichannel customer service is beneficial to your business in more ways than one:
As explained earlier in this article, how we communicate has changed. Our preferences and expectations have also changed. No customer wants to wait forever to get their problems solved, especially if it is an urgent problem. Imagine you pay for a TV subscription to watch a Champions League Final match that starts in 10 minutes, but the channel is still scrambled. You reach out to the service provider to complain, but you do not get a response till 40 minutes later. It takes another 20 minutes to resolve the issue. That’s over one hour of blockbuster live-action you missed. You would probably contemplate switching to their competitor after such a horrible experience.
“But how can we respond to everyone immediately, that’s impossible”. Well, the customers are always right. You can deliver on that promise with a solid CRM that supports omnichannel customer experience.
Omnichannel Customer Service gives companies the tools to satisfy their customers by keeping key customer information across channels. It then makes it accessible to the customer service or sales rep who is talking to the customers, no matter the channel they reached out through.
Also, Omnichannel saves both customers and companies time by ensuring customers do not always have to repeat themselves to multiple customer service reps.
Also Read: 5 Ways CRM Can Improve Customer Experience
Let’s face it, although businesses say they care about their customers, what most businesses really care about is how to increase their revenue and cut down expenses. Guess what? Omnichannel Customer Service helps to achieve both.
Depending on the business model, it costs as much as five times more to acquire new customers than to retain an existing one.
Omnichannel Customer Service also reduces the overhead cost of the number of customer service or sales reps by optimizing the people available to do the job. The system lets you know how many people you need to manage customer engagement. This reduces wasted operational costs and increases business profit.
Nothing makes customers feel more valued and prioritized than a personalized experience. When customers feel this way, they’ll keep coming back. It’s simple psychology – punish bad behaviour, reward good behaviour. Customers ‘punish’ businesses that don’t treat them well, and ‘reward’ those that do.
When your customers feel that no matter who they speak to, the sales or customer rep knows who they are, what they want, and how they want it; they get that special feeling that keeps them coming back for more.
As the name implies, the purpose of a CRM is to build relationships with your customers. The problem is that many businesses forget the ‘R’ in ‘CRM’, and end up using any tool that helps them send bulk messages to their prospects or customers without a solid feedback system.
Omnichannel Customer Service enables companies to build lasting relationships with each customer and improve loyalty through personalization.
Focus on the R in CRM. Build a personalized Relationship with your customers with NotchCX. Request a Demo.
Many businesses can only effectively be reached via one or a few channels because they don’t have a way to manage multiple channels. Businesses like these inevitably cut out a wide range of customers who cannot reach them through their preferred platforms.
Findings show that more than 70% of millennials will likely patronize brands that respond to their queries on social media platforms. Another demographic would prefer emails, while another would rather have a phone call. When a business does not cater to an audience’s preferred channel, they lose big time on potential customers.
At its most basic level, an omnichannel customer service platform follows customers through their various touchpoints, collecting valuable information about the customers that would be used in future interactions with not just them, but even other prospects and customers.
Guess which team in your company would find these insights most useful – all teams, including marketing, customer service, sales, and product. This data generates insights such as buying patterns, customer preferences, customer demographic tendencies, prefered funnels, etc. This is an insight that businesses use to know where their customers are and how they think.
All of the benefits stated above can be summarized into three interconnected stages:
But to reach the final stage, you need to take the first step of providing that seamless, synchronized, personalized experience for your customers via omnichannel customer support. And it all begins on NotchCX.
NotchCX is a Customer Experience CRM, that simplifies, automates, and nurtures business growth. It is built to deliver omnichannel customer service and improve customer service, increase customer retention, boost sales, and drive overall business success.
Take the first step, Request a Demo Now
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